King of the Cross

by Mark Dapin

  The table was set for four, but the seat next to Mendoza was empty.

  The sommelier asked if we had a preference for red or white wine. Mendoza ordered a magnum of Moet and a bottle of Grange ‘to celebrate the rekindling of love’s eternal flame’. The reflection of the lighted candle flickered in his eyes and made him look like the devil in hell.

  ‘Nicholas tells me you’ve been pursuing other interests,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen, ‘I’ve been fucking our best friend.’

  That got the bastard. He had nowhere to go. I thought he’d probably planned his evening’s conversation around abusing her but, as usual, I had underestimated his genius for malice.

  ‘And I’ve been watching you,’ said Helen. ‘That’s been my job.’

  ‘Were you able to combine business with pleasure?’ asked Mendoza as the waiter lingered to read out the specials.

  ‘It was always a pleasure,’ said Helen. ‘You’re a very interesting man.’

  Oh, she was good. She brought in her shoulders slightly, to give him a better look at her breasts.

  ‘I have only ever seen you carrying things and running away,’ said Mendoza. ‘First it was a television, then it was your clothes.’

  ‘I’ve only seen you take women to dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you take them home.’

  ‘I thought you might be a burglar,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘I thought you might be impotent,’ said Helen.

  ‘Can I interest you in the specials?’ asked the waiter.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Mendoza. ‘We’re waiting for one more.’

  I didn’t want to talk in front of a stranger, so I tried to get business over with while there was just the three of us.

  ‘Look, Jake,’ I said, ‘there are no Maltese.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘and the Holocaust was just a myth concocted by the Jews to win the sympathy of the world. That is why we are looked upon so sympathetically today.’

  ‘For God’s sake –’

  ‘If there are no Maltese, Slickolas, who the fuck do you think lives in Malta?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I didn’t use the right words, and you – quite rightly – tried to show me up in front of my girlfriend for trying to save your life. Why don’t we just eat dinner while you keep a lookout for the Maltese, then the Russians’ll come in and kill you and we’ll all be happy.’

  ‘Russians,’ said Mendoza, shaking his head.

  ‘Yes, fucking Russians,’ I said. ‘Who else do you think has the kit and the training?’

  ‘You don’t need to be Spetsnaz to take on the Cannibals,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘The Russians paid us to watch you,’ said Helen.

  ‘So?’ said Mendoza. ‘They must’ve had thousands of opportunities to kill me.’

  ‘They weren’t ready,’ I said.

  ‘How the fuck would you know?’ asked Mendoza.

  ‘It’s obvious. They don’t want to take on everyone at once. They had to finish off the bikers before they came for you. As soon as they did: bang bang.’ (I felt stupid for having said ‘bang bang’, but I didn’t let it derail my train of thought.)

  ‘Also, they needed time to get to know your organisation, to understand what they were taking over. This is all new to them.’

  ‘You don’t know what’s new to Russians,’ said Mendoza. ‘You don’t know anything. You’re not Russian. You’re not even Jewish.’

  ‘It’s the way I would’ve done it,’ I said.

  ‘Then certainly the most successful criminal organisation of our time would do things in exactly the same way as you because you, after all, are something of gangster yourself, having been discharged from the military for selling ecstasy.’

  ‘You know what else I’d do?’ I asked.

  ‘You would charge at them, hurl your gun in the air, then roll under a car.’

  ‘I’d look for someone in your organisation to turn,’ I said.

  ‘That would be you,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘That would be someone who spoke Russian,’ I said, ‘and knew you were going to be at the motel. It would be the person who let Natural Science go to Nouméa, who got a postcard from him and gave him up, and who invented the fucking ludicrous theory that you were being stalked by Malts.’

  Mendoza smiled.

  ‘My date should be along at any minute,’ he said. ‘Ah, here she is.’

  The waiter pulled out the empty chair for a woman to sit down. I recognised her perfume before I looked up.

  Mendoza introduced her to Helen.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ said Siobhan.

  ‘Were you fucking her?’ asked Helen as we walked home through east Sydney, past men with mohawks and moustaches eating small meals off big plates.

  ‘What did you think of Mendoza?’ I asked her.

  A beautiful woman in a low-cut dress walked out of a bar and onto the pavement, and I didn’t even look at her.

  ‘He’s exactly what I thought he’d be,’ she said. ‘Evil, funny, sexy . . .’

  She smiled, as if she was enjoying thinking about him.

  ‘Sexy?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, he’s got something, you know.’ She ran a finger along her lower lip. ‘Some kind of older man charm.’

  ‘You’re sick,’ I said.

  ‘How many other women have you been with while I was away?’

  ‘Thousands,’ I said.

  She dropped my hand.

  We went back to the unit and made love. I closed my eyes and pretended she was Siobhan. She closed hers and pretended I was Jed. Or Mendoza. I kissed her all over her face and neck. She drew her fingernails down my shoulders and cut tracks into my back.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘No, you love this,’ she said.

  ‘But that’s a part of you,’ I said.

  ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘This! ’

  When it was over, I didn’t want to let her out of my arms. She fell asleep cuddling me, her blonde hair flared out over the white pillowcase. I wondered why Mendoza wouldn’t believe Dror had given him up. We had to confront the guy, maybe hang him upside down for a bit. He was obviously going to set Mendoza up for another hit once the legionnaires arrived.

  Helen moaned in her sleep. I slipped out from under the quilt and sat at the table to smoke a joint, staring out of the window at the Pussycat Bordello. There were people drinking in the street and laughing. I could hear music, shouting and a glass shattering. I felt in the middle of it all and outside it, looking down on Mendoza’s kingdom of the night. He’d made this place, with all its terrors and disappointments, all its trash and hope and mechanical sex, and it was about to be taken from him.

  I squashed the joint and stumbled back to bed. Helen rolled against my chest, tucking her head beneath my chin. I dreamed of flying over the city, as someone shot out the lights, one by one.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  [Seaview House, Greenknowe Avenue, Potts Point. 30-04-02. 2:11 pm.]

  I gave my children everything and they blamed me for everything. When Daniel came back from France, he asked me for a fire engine, and I organised the delivery of a decommissioned tanker from the City of Sydney Fire Station. For two years Lazarus used it to drive him to school and, if there was traffic, they had permission from the fire commissioner to turn on the siren. Twice they were flagged down by residents whose homes were in flames but, despite my son’s pleas, the vehicle travelled empty. He was a good-hearted lad, who yearned to pump water where his father would have poured petrol – because a half-burned-down building is no fucking use to anyone. You end up with a dog’s breakfast like the top floor of the tattooist alav hashalom.

  Daniel was very much his mother’s son and shared both her morbid obsession with my private life and, later, her love for the imbecilic pastime of machine gambling. He had his bar mitzvah at the Great Synagogue, but became a man one year later between the legs of a woman known – for reasons that now escape me – as ‘the Performing Seal�
��.

  It was a great relief to me when the Seal reported back that my son had acquitted himself with enthusiasm. After all, he’d repeatedly told me he hoped to become an ‘actor’, which, as we all know, is a contraction of ‘arse-fucker’. Daniel was uncharacteristically cheerful for weeks afterwards and didn’t return to his miserable, effeminate self until he found out from McCoy that I had paid the Seal to unburden him of his load. In later years he came to hold this against me, along with a thousand other fucking things you would have thought he would be grateful for.

  Daniel became a leading light in the Moriah College dramatic society, and I did my best to help him make his way in his chosen profession. Did I fuck. I told him to get a proper job. He wanted to go to university, but you don’t learn anything at university except communism and faggotry, so I made sure he left school at seventeen and started work in the family business. I apprenticed him to McCoy, who was a weak influence on his mind and taught him to fall in love with every big-titted stripper I shoved his way to distract him from his imbecilic ambitions.

  If you don’t want your son to tread the boards, Anthony, don’t give him a job in a fucking nightclub. I think of myself as a clever man, but perhaps I have an exaggerated idea of my own intellect because I surround myself with imbeciles. I never guessed that Daniel would start his career as a warm-up act for the strippers. He got away with it for years, until one night I made an early inspection of Aphrodite’s, in time to catch him being booed off stage. He was about as funny as a curtain – as this curtain in this room. And this curtain is not funny at all, unless you are an imbecile. Are you laughing at the curtain, Anthony? Even worse, Daniel was working a double act with Big Stan’s imbecile son, who was Daniel’s straight man, if that were possible. It was pathetic. When Daniel came off stage, I congratulated him on his performance and invited him up to my office. I think he thought I was going to shoot him. I told him I was sorry I had overlooked his hard work and talent all these years, and I had finally decided to promote him to head of my overseas arm, which I had just fucking invented on the spot.

  The next day I gave business-class tickets to Las Vegas to Daniel and his wife.

  In Nevada I asked Daniel to investigate various impossible possibilities which, I calculated, would consume his inconsiderable energies for about three months, while I figured out how to stop him sinking the family name in shit. Meanwhile, I suggested, my grandson Martin could stay with Deborah and me, since there was no point in uprooting the poor child for such a short period, and bearing in mind that Daniel had never fucking shut up about being left in France about a hundred years before.

  I have another hint for you, Anthony, which might save you from disappointment should you ever find yourself trying to prevent your child from making an imbecile of himself as a stand-up comic: don’t deport him to the cabaret capital of the world. I had people watching Daniel, and they soon reported that he was getting gigs in shitty titty clubs as ‘the most famous comic in Australia’, and nobody in Vegas knew any different. He had worked up a new act, around the persona of a nice Jewish boy who grows up in a Mafia family (when other kids got horses, he got a horse’s head et cetera et cetera – no fucking mention of the fire engine). It was obviously too late to save Daniel from himself, so I left him in Vegas to make a deal to ship the Luxor Hotel to Kings Cross.

  The only good thing to come out of all this bullshit was that I was able to bring up my grandson in the way I should have raised Daniel, and finally ensure there would be a real man to succeed me as the head of this family.

  How did you fall out with Sharon?

  What you will learn, Anthony, if you ever have children, is they will always side with their mother. This is because their mother’s life often seems less complicated than their father’s, and also because their mother has more time and inclination to explain herself to them.

  Sharon’s mother Ira was the love of my life, but that does not mean she was the only woman in my life. From an early age Sharon was aware that Daddy – as she called me – shared another house with another family. When a child is very young, she accepts that, and believes every daddy serves two mummies. If only grown women were as understanding as little girls, the world would be a happier place, with love spread more evenly around, and more marriages would last as long as mine: forty-nine years to the same woman.

  As Sharon grew older, she came to question why I was not around at so-called ‘crucial moments’ in her life, which invariably occurred on a Tuesday or Friday night. (Strangely, according to my son, all his milestones took place on a Thursday or Saturday.) I tried to compensate for my absences by buying her first a pony and then a Mini Cooper, but my children have no memory for gifts and total recall of slights. Sharon complained that I was not there when the horse fell sick, or the car broke down, or she suffered from some other unavoidable fucking misfortune that an omnipresent father – God, for instance – might somehow have prevented.

  Of course, the day came when Sharon became interested in boys. If it were left up to me, she would have stayed clean until she either left home or turned twenty-one, but in response to her mother’s pressure I allowed her to go out whoring so long as she was accompanied by a chaperone. The gunnie would drive her to her date and, if the whole thing were visible through a window – if she was going to a cafe for coffee, for example – he would wait outside, then chauffeur her home at an appropriate time. If her liaison took place in a cinema, or the home of a friend, he would join Sharon inside and keep watch on her as unobtrusively as possible, without spoiling her evening. Needless to say, I did this for her own protection and, needless to say, I never got any fucking thanks.

  At the age of eighteen Sharon decided she was old enough to go out on her own, but she knew nothing about the real world, or all the terrible things that can happen to a girl if she falls in with the wrong sort of people – ie, men. Reluctantly, I let her have her ‘freedom’, but I always had somebody following her. At first it was one of my own people, but she knew them all and figured out how to give them the slip, so I hired a firm of private investigators to do the job.

  Their reports were disturbing. Although she didn’t dare stay away when I was at home on a Saturday, she took to spending Friday nights with a bespectacled, dope-smoking communist. The PIs bugged the bedroom in his mouldy fucking squat, with instructions to break in if things between them went too far. Luckily, Shy Guevara turned out to be a dud, a fizzer, a soft cock who couldn’t get it up, so they spent most of their time together listening to records and talking about politics, which neither of them had the first fucking idea about. When it turned out she couldn’t cure him of his faggotry, Sharon moved on to the next man. I had mixed feelings about Shy. I was almost grateful to the little scumbag for not moving in on my daughter’s cherry, but on the other hand I felt he’d insulted her with his inability to give her what she thought she wanted. Eventually I had him bashed, but not too badly.

  Boyfriend number two was another student. He seemed respectful enough at first, but I looked into his background and found that he’d got a girl pregnant the year before, so I had him thrown out of a window. Then, against my express wishes, Sharon went on holiday with her girlfriends to Fiji. Obviously my worst fear was she would be split open by some huge fucking coconut, but it turned out she lost it to a skinny white back-packer in a hammock between two trees. She came home with a smile like a Lotto winner. I had the boy tracked back to Brisbane, where he fell victim to an unforeseeable road accident caused by his inability to run fast enough to get away from the car.

  After that, I more or less gave up. If Sharon, however misguidedly, wanted a sexual relationship, there was nothing I could do about it, but I was determined she wouldn’t be exploited or preyed upon by the pond scum that use women and destroy them.

  Oh, come on . . .

  You think I’m a hypocrite, Anthony, because I would kill any man who tried to treat my daughter the way I have treated women, but you are the only fucking hypoc
rite in this airless room, because I tell you this: it’s every man’s responsibility to take charge of his own destiny. If they want to kill me, these raging imbeciles who believe I stripped their daughters of their honour when I stripped them of their clothes and coaxed them onto their knees, they can come after me. I won’t call the fucking jacks. I can give it and I can take it, Anthony. That is the true mark of a man.

  You think I don’t know the difference between right and wrong, but if morality boils down to ‘do as you would be done by’, how should we deal with Germans? And I’m not even talking about the war: there are some Germans who are happy to be pissed and shat on; and, only recently, one German consented to being eaten by another German. Does that mean we should eat Germans?

  So how come Sharon doesn’t speak to you now?

  She graduated from university with her degree in dustbin diving and got a job with a bottom-feeding, free-sheet of the type that might even have employed you, Anthony, until you turned in your first comically execrable story.

  As a junior she was given the lowliest tasks, such as compiling the local-history page. As my daughter, she was determined to do the best job she could, even though nobody gave a shit. The editor told her to concentrate on historical mysteries and I’ll give you one fucking guess what topic she picked – not Bogle-Chandler, not the shark-arm murders and not the Murrumbidgee River bunyip. Sharon chose the disappearance of Anita fucking King. For fuck’s sake, we’ve had a fucking prime minister disappear in Australia. What is it about Anita King?

  Sharon was sharing a house with a bunch of hippie drop-out drugged-up free-loving anarchist atheist scum, but she still came home for dinner with her daddy every Saturday night. Typically, we talked about affairs of the day and whether Sharon’s talents might not better be employed in the public-relations industry. On this particular evening she asked me if I had ever met Anita King. I said no, because I hadn’t. Then she asked if Uncle Morrie – which was her name for the Little Fish – knew that dead, bed-hopping slapper. I said I believed he may have had some business dealings with her, but nothing important. Then she asked if I knew who had killed Anita King, and I said, ‘Is this a dinner-table conversation, Sharon, or are you fucking interviewing me? Because, if you are, you can get out of my house right now, because I don’t allow journalists in my home, and you can be a journalist or you can be my daughter, but you can’t be both.’ Then she asked me if I had necked Anita King myself. Can you imagine that, Anthony? She asked her own father if he was a killer.